Rackspace Cloud Tools: Marketplace For Small Business Owner

Recently, RackSpace announced and unveiled their CloudTools platform. The best way to think about it is as an app store for cloud data and resources. These apps range from data monitoring to analytics to platform management to application deployment and just about everything in between.

Some analysts view the platform as nothing more than a cloud aggregator — offering a bunch of on-demand cloud-based management solutions for developers and other IT professionals for a single, easy-to-use portal. While there is truth to that claim, it is much more than a simple aggregation platform. Just as with any type of application or solutions marketplace it can be hard to navigate the different solutions. With the CloudTools stable of solutions growing at a rapid pace, users need to be able to cut through the fat and find the right cloud solutions that fit their needs. Here are a few of the most widely used and talked-about cloud solutions in the RackSpace marketplace.

Four Great Cloud Applications

SendGrid — This application is for those who, just like the majority of the modern world, don’t buy into this idea that email is dead. In fact, there is more than enough evidence to the contrary. Since email is still the de facto communication tool for business, it makes sense that email technology and distribution needs to merge with the growing cloud computing trend. This is exactly what SendGrid does. The big idea here is that SendGrid distributes email data based on a cloud-pricing model. In other words, what you’re really paying for is outgoing bandwidth or sent messages. SendGrid is for those who prefer their emails to be delivered effectively, which is pretty much everyone.

Cloudability — It’s easy to get excited about a new cloud offering, and it’s even easier to spend money you don’t have on cloud services you don’t need. The beauty of cloud computing is that you don’t have to buy the farm. You can simply pay for a subscription model that meets your needs. Nothing more, nothing less. Cloudability is a clever analytics tools that lets companies of all shapes and sizes monitor their spending on cloud technology. Think of Cloudability as that added insurance against breaking your IT piggy bank.

New Relic — Web developers have a new secret weapon in New Relic. Through a sophisticated set of web application monitoring tools, developers can use New Relic to ensure their web apps are running as quickly, efficiently and securely as possible.

AppFog — AppFog has been touted as the best-case-scenario solution for open source web developers. In a nutshell, it allows web developers to focus on what they do best: develop applications for the web. In other words, they can focus on coding, and not on managing complex server configurations. With AppFog, developers have access to a powerful development infrastructure without all of the IT hassle associated with server management and deployment.

The good news is that the RackSpace CloudTools marketplace isn’t necessarily difficult to navigate. But it can be easy to become overwhelmed with all the potentially exciting solutions you can access in their platform. Now that you have an idea of the quality cloud management and monitoring solutions out there, you can hit the ground running.